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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Merkel compared NSA to Stasi in heated encounter with Obama



"It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used.  This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
Even Schmidt
Former Commander, East German Stasi
Communist Secret Police

 


In an angry exchange with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel has compared the snooping practices of the US with those of the Stasi, the ubiquitous and all-powerful secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, where she grew up.

The German chancellor also told the US president that America's National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times.

Livid after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the accusation: "This is like the Stasi," reports the Guardian.

The Communist Secret Police
of East Germany.

The newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, "the NSA clearly couldn't be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out."

Snowden is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month, to the anger of Washington which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony.

Of special interest is Big Brother boot-licker "Conservative" Republican Congressman Mike Rogers who never met a person he did not want to unconstitutionally spy on.

In Brussels, the chairman of the US House select committee on intelligence, Mike Rogers said his views on the invitation to Snowden were "not fit to print" and that it was "not a great idea".

Inviting someone "who is wanted in the US and has jeopardized the lives of US soldiers" was beneath the dignity of the European parliament, he said.

TRANSLATION  -  Cover everything up as fast as possible.  Don't let the Plebs know we are spying on them.

The a-hole Rogers declined to comment on Merkel's alleged remarks to Obama. In comments to the Guardian, he referred to the exchange as "a conversation that may or may not have occurred".

A draft report by a European parliament inquiry into the affair, being presented on Wednesday and obtained by the Guardian, says there has to be a discussion about the legality of the NSA's operations and also of the activities of European intelligence agencies.

The report drafted by Claude Moraes, the British Labour MEP heading the inquiry, says "we have received substantial evidence that the operations by intelligence services in the US, UK, France and Germany are in breach of international law and European law".

The Germans have received assurances that the chancellor's phone was not being monitored and that the US spy agency is not conducting industrial espionage.


"We Germans have had to experience the
abuse of state power with secret services
twice in our history."

President Joachim Gauck

The NSA's New Spy Facilities are 7 Times Bigger Than the Pentagon.
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Move along.  Nothing to see here.
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The $1.2 billion surveillance data center in Utah that is 15 times the size of MetLife Stadium, home to the New York Giants and Jets.  In May, crews broke ground on a $792 million computing center at the agency’s headquarters near Baltimore that will complement the Utah site. Together the Utah center and Maryland’s 28-acre computer farm span 228 acres—more than seven times the size of the Pentagon.
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Four years ago, the stated purpose of the megaplex near Salt Lake City was to amass foreign intelligence and warnings about hackers. Officials described it as an extension of President George W. Bush’s 2008 Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a largely classified, cross-agency program to protect U.S. computer networks against adversaries.
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Today, it is evident the data plantation will not be linked to any one program. Instead, the systems inside will warehouse counterterrorism information collected in aggregate, including millions of Americans’ phone logs for five years and certain foreigners’ online messages, NSA officials confirm.
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See more at:  Defense One.com

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